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Conversion rate (CVR) measures the likelihood of visitors to complete a "conversion" or desired action, like subscribing to a newsletter, creating an account, and making a purchase. As such, it's typically used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for measuring the impact of your advertising and marketing efforts on your bottom line.
To calculate CVR, divide your conversions by the total number of impressions or views, then multiply the result by 100.
The higher your CVR, the more profitable your eCommerce website is. That said, it's important to investigate and optimize the factors that affect CVR to reap the full benefits of your marketing and advertising efforts.
Website performance is one such factor.
Statistics show that websites that load in one second have three times higher conversions than pages that load in five seconds, and five times higher than those that load in 10 seconds. And it's not hard to see why.
Page speed is directly tied to the user experience.
If your page is slow, expect to have decreased user engagement, increased customer frustration, and lost conversions.
Furthermore, pages that load in three seconds or more have a 32% higher bounce rate (users leaving your site without clicking anything) than those that load in one second. That's a huge chunk of potential sales lost before users even get the chance to convert.
Understanding the Relationship Between Landing Page and Conversion Rate
Let's take a deeper dive into the relationship between landing page speed and CVR:
User Expectations and Patience
In the age of instant gratification, people are more easily disappointed by delays, be it in online store performance, mobile app speed, and video streaming.
Decades of studies have established the fact that being accustomed to fast-flowing information can affect a person's focus and patience. A recent example included insights from Gloria Mark, PhD, of UC Irvine, on how technology affects modern attention spans.
"So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average," said Professor Mark. "Throughout the years it became shorter — so around 2012, we found it to be 75 seconds."
Professor Mark also stated that user attention spans continued to worsen over the years.
"And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds, and others have replicated this result within a few seconds."
The more websites cater to users' diminished attention spans, the worse the problem gets. That's because users now expect pages to load in two seconds or less.
If you don't adhere to this standard, you're essentially giving up customers to hundreds of other eCommerce brands that can offer a better experience.
The Psychology of Speed
All in all, slow websites result in a number of negative psychological effects on users, including frustration, disengagement, and distrust in your brand.
Think that's bad?
The fact is, people tend to perceive poor performance to be worse than they actually are. This is exacerbated when remembering the experience down the line.
Suppose your website actually takes 10 seconds to load.
For users, the bad experience clouds their perception and makes them feel like it took 12 seconds to load everything. And later on, when talking about your website with their friends, they might mention that it’s annoyingly slow.
Naturally, you can avoid this cascade of events by providing users with top-notch website performance in the first place.
Data-Backed Evidence
It's easy to grasp the effects of website performance on the user experience.
But what about your business objectives?
Let's see what the data has to say:
- According to a study conducted by Deloitte, a 0.1-second improvement in loading speed increased conversions for retail brands by 8.4%.
- Nood increased CVR by 24% after improving their page load time with Nostra.
- A case study featuring Vodafone recorded an increase in sales by 8% after optimizing Core Web Vitals.
- In another case study, eBay reported a 0.5% increase in "Add to Cart" clicks for every 0.1-second improvement in loading speed.
- Finally, Yelp reported a 15% increase in conversion rate after optimizing their First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric — one of the three main Core Web Vitals metrics.
Key Factors that Impact Landing Page Speed
To better understand the dynamics of landing page speed, let's investigate the factors that affect it:
Server Response Time
Server response time is a metric that measures the time it takes for servers to respond to HTTP requests.
Fast server responses ensure your browser gets all the necessary resources it needs to render a page quickly.
This is largely affected by server resources, the user's hardware, and the physical distance the data packets have to travel. Improve this by upgrading to a more capable hosting plan, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), or leveraging an Edge Delivery Network.
Page Size and Content
Larger website resources consume more bandwidth, which in turn adds to a page's loading time.
We're talking about large background images, server-hosted videos, and large scripts.
Implementing smarter loading protocols for these assets, like deferred loading and preloading, can greatly improve page performance. Other strategies include compressing your visuals, embedding video links (as opposed to loading self-hosted videos), and minifying scripts also yield positive results.
Third-Party Scripts
Third-party scripts inject additional functionality into your website through plugins, social media integrations, ad loaders, and other add-ons.
Unfortunately, large third-party script downloads can block your page rendering. This has a detrimental effect on your page's FCP metric, which could lead to poor performance and a bad impression on users.
As a rule of thumb, it's important to clean up or remove unused JavaScript files that you no longer need. Otherwise, you need to implement a few strategies like asynchronous loading, deferred loading, and pre-connecting to script origins to speed up their loading.
Browser Caching and Content Delivery Networks
Browser caching allows static website resources to be stored locally on a user's device. As a result, they no longer need to be downloaded when users revisit the page — at least until the cache gets cleared.
CDNs, on the other hand, help beat the problem of network latency by utilizing proxy servers to deliver cached website data to nearby users.
Both are effective in speeding up perceived website performance. However, not all websites use CDNs, and not all users enable browser caching on their end.
Proven Strategies to Optimize Landing Page Speed
Understanding the relationship between page speed and conversion rate — check.
Learning the common factors that affect site performance — check.
Now, you're ready to learn about the proven strategies to optimize performance on your pages.
Let's get started.
1. Image Optimization
Image optimization encompasses a handful of tactics that speed up the downloading and rendering of images — from background photos to hero images.
A straightforward approach is to compress your images with tools like ImageOptim and TinyPNG. These tools work by shrinking the file size of your images while preserving a degree of quality and clarity.
Alternatively, you can convert your images into Next-Gen image formats like WebP or AVIF before uploading them to your site. For this, consider using tools like CloudConvert that can streamline the conversion process through a browser-based interface.
Another option is to implement lazy loading to prevent large image files from blocking the rendering of crucial page elements.
In simple terms, lazy loading will only paint assets on a page whenever they come into the viewport. This will significantly improve important metrics such as your site’s Core Web Vitals, specifically Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and First Content Paint (FCP).
The easiest way to use lazy loading is through your eCommerce platform's built-in or add-on features. For example, if your eCommerce website is running on Shopify, use the Loadify: Preloader & SEO Speed app.
While you're in the business of optimizing images, you should also use responsive images to ensure their size fits the user's display. This prevents browsers from downloading images that are larger than necessary — improving your page's bandwidth efficiency.
A simple way to enable responsive images is to use resolution switching, which can be achieved with the code below:
2. Code Optimization
Next to images, you also need to optimize code such as JavaScript and CSS to improve your website's loading speed.
Code minification, for example, reduces the size of your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files by removing unnecessary characters and white spaces.
The practical way to minify code is through website plugins or external tools like Minifier. Just enter your file's URL or paste the code itself and click 'Minify.'
After minifying your code, you can further improve your website's loading speed by deferring non-critical scripts. This works by delaying bits of code that aren't essential to the FCP and LCP — allowing your page to finish loading and be responsive as soon as possible.
To defer the loading of scripts, simply add the 'defer' attribute to script tags.
Also consider inlining essential CSS code below the header section of your website's main document. This saves browsers the trouble of downloading additional CSS to load important sections of your page.
If you believe your site’s code needs more than just minification and might require the removal of unused code, check out our article on “How and Why You Should Remove Unused JavaScript for Optimal Performance." This guide explains how unused JavaScript can affect your site’s performance and offers practical steps for optimizing your code.
3. Server and Hosting Optimization
To solve long server response times and network latency, the first thing you need to look at is your web hosting service.
If you're still on a shared hosting plan, look into upgrading to a more capable solution, such as Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, and managed hosting. Be sure to choose a trusted web hosting service and check the reviews for any potential issues, like frequent downtimes, poor customer service, and limited scalability.
To augment your hosting plan's capabilities, you can also rely on CDNs or edge delivery networks to deliver a more consistent website performance literally across the globe.
Learn more about edge delivery networks and how they improve page speeds in this post.
4. Third-Party Script Management
When it comes to third-party scripts, your optimization options depend on how they're used on your website.
Your first priority is to clean up any unused bits of code that might still be clogging up your main thread.
PageSpeed Insights can reveal these unnecessary files. Just make sure they're actually no longer needed on your page — not just deferred, below-the-fold code.
Similar to images, you can also use lazy loading on certain scripts so they don't impede the loading of essential elements. To manage scripts for background tasks, run them through a web worker using the 'Worker()' constructor call to improve responsiveness.
You can also experiment by self-hosting important scripts, which means importing and running them through your own server. This will give you more control over the scripts' functions and loading behavior, but in turn presents challenges in keeping them updated.
Measuring and Analyzing Landing Pages
To determine if your optimization efforts are paying off, use website performance analysis tools like PageSpeed Insights on a regular basis.
PageSpeed Insights provides you with an up-to-date, detailed view of your Core Web Vitals metrics. This includes secondary metrics, namely FCP, First Input Delay (FID), and Time to First Byte (TTFB).
In addition to tracking your Core Web Vitals metrics, PageSpeed Insights also provides an in-depth look at the performance issues detected on your website.
You can easily identify high-priority issues by looking at the icon next to them.
A red triangle indicates critical issues that have a huge impact on page performance.
An orange square indicates medium-priority issues that also deserve attention.
Lastly, a gray circle indicates low-priority performance issues that can wait until you've addressed higher-priority problems.
PageSpeed Insights also highlights the estimated impact of each issue. This can be reported as potential time saved, file size reduced, and total blocking time.
Aside from PageSpeed Insights, here are other tools you can use to analyze page speed performance:
Conclusion
As with any business, your success depends on how you treat your customers.
Providing a good user experience through performance optimizations, for example, will surely reflect positively on your income statement. You just need to understand how to measure the page experience and which strategies can help improve it.
Before you go, keep in mind that performance optimization is an ongoing process that requires regular tracking.
Stay on track with a tool like PageSpeed Insights and aim for consistent progress if your optimization results hit a plateau, up your game by using an industry-leading Edge Delivery Service like Nostra to achieve fast and reliable results.
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